The Imposter Club (weekends in May 2026)

During the festival, the co-working space I use in Brighton becomes The Imposter Club artists open house. Cartoons, photos, printing (2D and 3D), installations, interactive art, and "doodling is good for you" workshops. Just turn up, have a poke around. The last day of the club is Sunday, 24 May 2026.
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Tuesday 12 May 2026 is Mass Observation Diary Day, which "is about recording everyday life in the UK for future generations". This year we are keen to hear about your thoughts and feelings about nature and wellbeing as well as anything else you would like to share about your day. The submission page is over...
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Dogs have lots of teeth

At the dog’s annual service, the vet noticed trauma on two teeth. Looks like Breezy had chewed on something too enthusiastically, and those teeth would have to come out. That operation was yesterday. While the dog was recovering, the vet called with a shock. The x-rays showed up damage the vet hadn’t been able to see....
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At the UCL Advanced Therapies Symposium 2026

It’s good to know your limits, and I met them hard the other week at an event on cell therapies, CAR-T, and gene therapies. It’s an exciting area for personalised treatment. It could involve taking a cell, reprogramming the genome, and popping it back in. Doing that, you’ve perhaps taught your cells how to fight a...
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"Large, weird, monstrous forms"

You go out for a perfectly normal dog walk along Hove Lawns, and you find sculptures. Big ones. We guess about 4m tall. Up close, they look to be made of twigs, held together with what feels like a sand-like coating. Yes, it's Brighton Festival time. And this is Soft Machines:
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At "Claude Code Anonymous"

Earlier in the month I was at the first Brighton Claude Code Anonymous meet-up. Lightning talks and chat, around agentic coding (not limited to Claude). I’m unsure of the etiquette, so I’ll name the things I found interesting rather than the people presenting them. On running models locally, the hardware to look out for...
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Swans have massive nests

Swans have massive nests
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"Flocks of starlings, rustling like silk"

On morning walks in January we are sometimes lucky enough to have Starlings fly over us. They appear out of nowhere, presumably from nesting on the piers, heading inland. The sound is acute and fleeting, wonderful, and I've never known how to describe it. Last night, reading The Birds (1952) in Daphne du Maurier's After...
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There’s a guy on the seafront who makes giant bubbles. Kids go crazy for it—maybe not just kids—and he gets a good crowd. Some days the breeze lifts them over the road and they can travel far inland to Regency Square. Which can surprise some dog walkers and their small terriers.  
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Freelancers and LLMs: Expertise, judgement and trust

Reading: The more commodified your job, the more likely AI can do it – lessons from online freelancing, The Conversation, 9 April 2026. Upwork is one of the online freelancer marketplaces. They’ve reported that ChatGPT has resulted in a decrease in low-value work, and an increase in demand for high-value work (contracts...
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Ten years ago I added a reminder to my calendar to check on how this prediction was panning out: In a decade’s time computing seems likely to take the form of AR interfaces mediated by AI, using gestures and speech for inputs and the whole world as its display. Speech input has come on, and LLMs have happened. AR...
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A Micropub server for Pagecord

With the release of the Pagecord API, I can scratch a small itch: publishing from iA Writer to my Pagecord blog. iA Writer isn't for everything, but it's good for focus, has nice attribution tools, and more importantly, it's the editor I've somehow stuck with. I've been curious about its ability to publish to various...
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Test of posting to Pagecord from iA Writer

This is a test post sent to my Pagecord blog directly from iA Writer. Made possible by the Micropub spec and the Pagecord API. Details to follow another day.
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"That which is not inspected deteriorates"

To learn about how policy, science, and markets get food to the shops, I went along to last week's Brighton Cafe Sci. It featured Prof. Erik Millstone talking on the science and politics of food security.   Highlights: Good news: because bacteria in food make you ill quickly, the food industry does a good job of using...
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Arriving back in Brighton, over the London Road Viaduct

Arriving back in Brighton, over the London Road Viaduct
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